The habits in the interview

A young man in Dubai is starting a business, and he has been reading interviews with people who built very large ones.

He has learned a great deal about their mornings. One wakes before four. One wears the same outfit every day so that he never has to choose. One takes a freezing bath. One is famous for shouting at people in meetings, and the article seems to admire it.

So he sets an alarm for quarter to four, buys seven identical shirts, and practises being impatient.

It is an easy mistake to make, and a very old one. When we cannot see why something worked, we copy whatever we can see. The visible details of a successful life get treated as the recipe, because the real recipe is mostly invisible: years of patient work on a problem other people had, and a lot of luck about timing.

Those mornings and shirts were present when the success happened. That does not mean they produced it. Plenty of people wake at four and build nothing. Plenty of people who changed their industry slept until eight and dressed however they liked.

The habits that get written about are the ones that make good copy. Nobody profiles the founder whose secret was listening carefully to forty customers and fixing what annoyed them. It is too dull to print, and it is what actually happened.

He can keep the shirts if he likes them. They will not hurt.

But the work is somewhere else. Find a real problem that real people have, and solve it well. That is enough. The theatre around it is optional.